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Sunday, 5 February 2017

We Need an Ecosocialist Revolution – How Might it Happen?

This is an extract from a piece written by John Bellamy Foster and published at Monthly Review

If natural science has taught us that the rapid pace of
anthropogenic climate change threatens to destroy the planet as a home for
humanity, then we must turn to social science to understand the actual social
causes of climate change, and the necessary solutions. However, as a rule, the
social sciences are compromised from the start. As shown in particular by the
discipline of economics, they are ideologically compelled to answer all
concrete issues in terms set by capitalism, excluding any perspective that
seriously challenges that system or its boundaries. Social scientists are thus
discouraged from questioning—or indeed even naming—the fundamental structures
and workings of the historical system in which we live.

It follows that the social-scientific contributions most
relevant to our understanding of the causes and imperatives of climate change
have originated outside the mainstream of academic social science, in critical
analyses of capitalism. At issue, as decades of research have demonstrated, is
the disjuncture between, on the one hand, the increasing demands put on the
environment by a process of ever-expanding capital accumulation, rooted in
class, competition, and inequality, and on the other, the capacity of the
environment to withstand this assault. The growing pressure on the climate,
moreover, is currently taking an especially acute form, due to the system’s
heavy reliance on fossil-fuel production as a proven engine of capital
accumulation worldwide—together with the vested interests of wealth and power
that block any transition to renewable forms of energy.

In logical-historical terms, capitalism is a system of
capital accumulation, a juggernaut in which each new level of economic growth
becomes the mere means to further growth, ad infinitum. In the course of its
history, capital has been able to “shift” the rifts that it has created in the
natural metabolism, displacing them elsewhere, often by imposing such
externalities on the most vulnerable populations. The capital-accumulation
system, however, has now expanded its operations to encompass the entire
planet, disrupting the biogeochemical processes of the Earth system itself,
most dramatically in the form of climate change. Even though a conversion to
renewable energy is hypothetically conceivable within the system, capital’s
demand for short-term profits, its competitive drive, its vested interests, and
its inability to plan for long-term needs all militate against rational energy
solutions.

The imperatives of capital accumulation, as analysed in
radical social-science research over the last century and half (beginning in
1867 with the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital), are further complicated by
the advent, near the end of the last century, of monopoly-finance capital. In
this phase the system is characterized by higher levels of global economic
concentration, an accumulation regime dominated by financial-asset accumulation
and the globalization of production, and a neoliberal political order—giving
rise, in some cases, to neo-fascism. Structurally related to this, as an
underlying cause, is the stagnation of accumulation in the advanced capitalist
economies, and the world economy as a whole.16 Under this new financialized
capitalism, neoliberal policies have sought to remove all regulations on the
free flow and amassing of wealth, siphoning more and more of total income into
the financial sector, and creating a system of global labor arbitrage or
worldwide unequal exchange, the latest phase of imperialism.

All of this is connected in the present historical
conjuncture to the declining hegemony of the United States, the rise of China,
and attempts to maintain imperial control via the triad of the United States,
Europe, and Japan. Elements of the U.S. ruling class—garishly personified by
Trump and his advisers—and of the triad as a whole are striving in these
circumstances to resurrect national and imperial power through fossil fuels
(and nuclear power), military buildups, financial control, and the repression
of immigrants and racially defined “others”—enlisting in this new but
retrograde imperial project parts of a downwardly mobile and demoralized white
working class.

This countervailing reaction of a system in peril shows the
limits of reform in the epochal crisis—both economic and ecological—in which
the world is now entrapped. Reform is only ever viable under the regime of
capital to the extent that it does not come close to threatening the
fundamental conditions that govern accumulation as a whole—and well before that
point is reached, vested interests normally intervene to stop substantive
reforms. The social transformations demanded today by the reality of climate
change (as well as economic stagnation) are of such a scale and significance that
large sections of these entrenched interests perceive such necessary changes as
a danger not only to the immediate prospects for accumulation, and to their own
positions of power, but also to the very existence of capitalism—whose
importance, in their accounting, outweighs that of the climate itself.

Under these conditions, environmental reforms tend to be too
limited to achieve their goals, and even then face unrelenting opposition from
fossil-fuel companies and their investors and allies—a category that covers
much of the global ruling class. Meanwhile, the almost total failure of
centrist-liberal parties and governments, along with their counterparts in the
academy, to remove their self-imposed blinders and perceive the reality of
capitalism’s war on the earth reflects a major moral and ideological default of
establishment social science. The result is climate policies that have proven
substantially ineffective, and whose implementation represents little more than
a loss of precious time amid a rapidly worsening planetary emergency.

It is in the face of this failure of centrist climate policy
that Naomi Klein, issuing a wake-up call for the left, famously declared that,
at least on this crucial issue, “the right is right.” That is, the right is
correct in believing that this is a case of “capitalism versus the
climate”—though wrong in choosing the former over the latter. So far, in its
war on the climate, Klein acknowledges, “capitalism is winning.”20 The system
shows no sign of applying the brakes as the runaway train of the profit system
hurtles toward the climate precipice. The world’s people in these circumstances
are mere hostages—unless they should choose to mutiny.

The primary efforts of radical climate activists in the
present historical conjuncture have focused on blocking coal and unconventional
fossil fuels, such as oil sands, tight oil, shale gas, oil shale, and oil from
ultra-deep-sea wells. This approach is based on a complex climate-change exit
strategy articulated most definitively by Hansen, who has argued that in order
to limit the consumption of fossil fuels in today’s society while promoting the
switch to non-fossil-fuel energy sources, it is necessary to increase the price
of fossil fuels substantially through a carbon-fee-and-dividend system. Under
such a plan, a fee on carbon, imposed and ratcheted up in stages, would be
levied at the mine shaft, wellhead, or point of import, and 100 percent of the funds
collected would be redistributed as dividends to families on a per capita
basis. The result would be that the vast majority of individuals, with lower
carbon footprints at lower income levels, would come out ahead, even under the
assumption that the corporations would pass on the full cost of the fees—since
the costs net of dividends would fall on those with higher carbon footprints
and higher income levels. The beauty of Hansen’s scheme is that it would help
mobilize humanity as a whole on a class basis with regard to carbon footprints.

However, a higher price for carbon, Hansen insists, is not
itself sufficient. It is also necessary to focus on the more dangerous carbon
fuels, proscribing their use. Hansen has argued that a key to any exit strategy
has to prioritize direct action aimed at shutting down existing coal plants, as
well as a moratorium on any new coal plants, and the blocking of the Alberta
tar sands—since coal and tar sands oil represent the dirtiest fossil fuels,
which could quickly break the global carbon budget. True to his strategy,
Hansen has put himself on the line and has been arrested in protests against
both coal and tar sands oil.

Nevertheless, the Hansen exit strategy, though influential
within the movement—particularly in its call for direct action to block coal
and unconventionals—is weakened by its overemphasis on carbon prices. Anderson
has argued that the affluent, who have the highest carbon footprints, can
always afford to pay higher carbon prices. More effective would be direct
governmental intervention to establish stringent maximum-emissions standards
for high-energy consuming devices. This is not a technological problem, he
points out, because the energy-saving and alternative-energy technologies
already exist, and in many cases can be immediately substituted at little
long-term cost to society as a whole. It does mean, however, confronting the
“political and economic hegemony” of the system, including neoclassical
economics, which is subservient to the capitalist order.

All of this reflects a narrowing of the options for humanity
and the earth. In the current climate conjuncture, the historically necessary
ecological and social revolution, in which humanity as a whole would seek to
once again take history in its hands, this time to stave off the impending
catastrophes of an irrational system, would have to take part in two stages.
The first would involve the formation of a broad alliance, modeled after the
Popular Front against fascism in the 1930s and ’40s. Today’s Popular Front
would need to be aimed principally at confronting the fossil-fuel-financial
complex and its avid right-wing supporters. In this first stage of the
struggle, manifold demands could be made and broadly agreed on within the
existing system—ways of eliminating carbon emissions and economic waste while
also promoting social and environmental needs—which, although inimical to the
logic of capital, and particularly to the fossil-fuel industry, would not call
into immediate question the existence of the capitalist system itself.

However, in the long run, capitalism’s threat to planetary
boundaries cannot be solved by stopgap reforms, however radical, that leave the
system’s fundamental features intact while simply transcending its relation to
fossil fuels. The danger to the planetary environment posed by the accumulation
of capital is all-encompassing. This means that the ecological revolution will
have to extend eventually to the roots of production itself, and will have to
assume the form of a system of substantive equality for all: racial freedom,
gender and LGBTQ equality, a classless society, an end to imperialism, and the
protection of the earth for future generations.

In the long run, the struggle is therefore synonymous with
the movement towards socialism. The more revolutionary the struggle, the more
it is likely to emanate from those whose needs are greatest, and thus from the
global South. It is in the periphery of the system, rather than in the center,
that humanity is most likely to mutiny against the existing order. Hope today
therefore lies first and foremost in the revolt of “the wretched of the earth,”
opening up fissures at the center of the system itself.

But even if all of this were to fail, and our present hopes
were to go unrealized, with the world pushed to the planetary turning point, it
would remain true, then as now, that the only answer is ecological and social
revolution. There is no next time. It is the fire this time.